Former martial arts fighter starts Bordentown academy after fighting career cut short by brain surgery

BORDENTOWN — Michele Thompson recalled the day vividly and with a fond laugh. The 1992 Hamilton High School graduate was working as a finance manager, and after a business meeting a colleague relayed a message from the person associated with an account she just met.

“They called and said that they had an extra room if I needed it,” Thompson said with a laugh. The offer was understandable: She had showed up to the appointment with a black eye and welts on her face. “They thought my boyfriend or husband was abusing me.”

Men were indeed fighting with Thompson, but it was completely above board. Such was the life of Thompson at that time: businesswoman by day, fighter by night.

“My dad and I, instead of watching cartoons, we would watch C-rated martial arts movies, and I would try and do it all the moves on my father,” Thompson said. “I was fascinated since birth.”

The day she was old enough to fill out a legal consent form, she signed up to start training. But times were different back in the early 1990s. Mixed martial arts academies were not yet sprinkled throughout communities as they are now, so she picked up the Yellow Pages.

Her perusing drew her to an academy that offered instruction in muay Thai, a combat sport from Thailand.

“I walked into the school, and they were wearing sweatpants, T-shirts and sneakers; music was blaring, and they were hitting stuff,” Thompson said. “I was like, ‘This is for me.’ The minute I started hitting pads, I was sold. And then they stuck a weapon in my hands. I thought it was the best thing ever. That probably tells you a little bit about me.”

Initially, Thompson was not thinking about a professional fighting career. She just felt a natural connection to the art, and for the first few years at least, that was nearly enough to satisfy the warrior inside of her.

“When I first came up, there weren’t that many women,” Thompson said. “My instructor had a wife that did muay Thai, and I thought she was incredible. We bonded, we were really close.

“Guys don’t want to train with girls, so I really had to earn their respect. I’m a very competitive person by nature, so I was like, ‘Oh yeah, you’re going down, buddy.’ And I’m thankful for that,” Thompson said. “To me, that’s what made me a really strong woman and a really strong fighter inside and out.”

After her instructor and coach realized they could only harness the beast within Thompson for so long, they raised the possibility of a fighting career, she said.

Thompson readily accepted the offer, but encountered a problem. Back then there were few female muay Thai fighters. Even when they found another female, issues relating to weight class and experience often prevented the fight from happening.

Over the course of her career, she was scheduled to fight 12 times, but ended up fighting just twice. Often, just as the fight was approaching, she would find out her opponent had backed out or a suitable match simply could not be found.

THE DAMAGE WAS ALREADY DONE

By the time Thompson was preparing for what proved to be her last fight, she knew something wasn’t right. The repeated blows to the head she had sustained during fight-training had taken a toll.

“I started waking up unable to use my right arm,” Thompson said. “It was dead. Not asleep, dead. I was getting really bad migraines, would taste metal, and one time during a test, I was kicking Thai pads and lost my sight.”

After doctors misdiagnosed her condition for months, she eventually ended up at the University of Pennsylvania, where Dr. Gordon Baltuch determined she had a syrinx, a build-up of fluid that caused her spinal cord to bulge out.

“He basically said that within a week, I needed to get in and get decompression surgery or that I would lose my right arm. And he said that if I didn’t get the surgery done I would eventually be a quadriplegic,” Thompson said.

She went ahead with the surgery and felt a tremendous sense of relief afterward.
“There’s no feeling in the world like that, knowing that you came out of brain surgery and you were alive,” she said

THE FIGHTER BECOMES THE TEACHER

While recovering from her brain surgery, Thompson also struggled with the thought of not being able to fight any longer.

“I still stayed in touch with my instructors, I still went to all my seminars and kept all of my credentials,” Thompson said. “Believe it or not, after six months I was training again. But it was hard for me to be around fighters.”

Initially her friend, mixed martial artist Chris Tran, persuaded her to start training and conditioning fighters two days a week in his gym, Weapons 9, on Jersey Avenue in New Brunswick. Gradually she accepted her new path in life.

“I loved being at Weapons 9 with Chris, because it was pure muay Thai, but I’m certified in all these other arts,” Thompson said. “I wanted to train in the other arts and didn’t want to lose my knowledge in those arts.”

So she found a location at 142 Farnsworth St. — a whopping 250-square-foot room — in downtown Bordentown and founded the East Coast Academy of Martial Arts. The school eventually outgrew its space so Thompson moved it to 102 Fransworth, a vast 3,000-square-foot facility.

East Coast Academy now services close to 100 students cutting across all age ranges, and teaches everything from JKD/Jun Fan, Kali Escrima, Muay Thai, Wing Chun, Maphilindo Silat, Ashtanga Yoga and children’s classes.

“I teach kids with autism, ADHD, oppositional defiant disorder,” Thompson said. “A lot of it is about giving them structure. I feel sorry for parents, because I know it’s not easy.

Sometimes it’s hard to be a firm hand as a parent to a child who suffers from a disability, but to give them structure and discipline is the best thing you can do.”